in.game strategy
I have been a long time fan of Danah Boyd and I recently saw on PSFK theat she has updated her list of research on social network sites and social media.
The articles are fantastic and range from the emergence of hyperfriends to privacy issues and the Fourth Amendment. Luckily there is an excellent overview here as the amount of information is mind-blowing…
One of my favorite writers once said; “Being the best is the enemy of being good“. By that he means that to succeed you don’t have to be the best. If you are good at what you do you can be successful. If you strive to be the best you often just end up losing. (both the plot and the race.)
It is more evident now than ever before with the amazing amount of interaction on the web. If you strive to be the best in your field you are going to be competing with a lot of others. The only way to be the best is through hyper-segmentation and even then you might have competition. It really goes hand in hand with the idea of the long tail, with the amount of information on the flattened web there is so much knowledge and you can never really know it all.
You can no longer sit around resting on your laurels, you need to be out there learning, getting it wrong, getting it right… Collaborating, learning together. It’s time to let go.
More and more enterprises are using social networking systems to run various areas of their businesses. Project management programs are taking over from project managers and my Remember-the-Milk is working nicely as a kind-of-seceretary.
But when implementing or designing a system there are a few things one has to take into account.
I recently came across a very interesting article on masternewmedia on social network design. The article, Social Network Design: The Network Is A Living System, Design It As Such says that it is possible to apply living systems design to social networks.
They break down the living system into the four key components. It is interesting to see how they correspond to a social system.
I recently picked up on an brilliant article by Nicholas Carr on how the internet is changing the way we think. The article, Is Google Changing the Way We Think is an amazing insight into how the internet is rewiring our brains.
He says “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” It seems too much information is reducing our reading pleasure, or at the very least giving our brains massive information overload.
An interesting development in the information age is the lack of necessary information required to function in the digital sphere. As colleague Max Kaizen put it: “even without knowing about electrical circuits you flick the light switch and the lights come on”.
A lot of benefit can be gained from collaboration and with connectivity at an all time high it is now much more feasible. There is a lot to be said for Albert Einstein’s quote “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”. There is so much information out there and it is all readily available that you don’t have to be an expert on something to know how it works… You just need to be able to bring the right expertise in to help when necessary, it’s all about synergy…
I recently came across this simple but brilliant image depicting the evolution of online conversations and their increase in variety and volume by Dion Hinchcliffe.
He writes on how conversation models are continuing to evolve on the web and how it will be effecting how we converse and interact.
It is an interesting article as it ties in to how social networking that was based around conversations is now, through mediums such as Twitter and Friendfeed, adding more interaction between people. The personal interaction that was lost in Web 1.0 and started to pick up with the advent of blogs is now, through feeds and mirco-blogging, moving to an even more conversational approach.
It almost reminds one of how sms’s took off. They were first seen as a novelty and then their true potential as conversational tools was realised. Today they are now one of the main forms of conversation used by people.
While discussing forms of media around the dinner table the other night topic came round to editing and the role of editors in todays information rich world…
The point brought up was the fact that the contributors to media are far more numerous than ever before. The Long-tail effect of the internet means that instead for a handful of writers producing a lot of info there are now also millions of contributors of small amounts of information.
With these developments the role of the editor is changing to accommodate the wider readership, more contributors and a much wider scope of information generated today. Curatorship is a major topic when it comes to internet use-ability what with there being so much disseminated information available. It comes down to relevance… If there is someone who knows and supplies exactly what you need or want to know you will read what they say far more than you will read any others…
Curators are the new editors, they filter the information for their readers and decide what is relevant and what isn’t. Content can now be generated by anyone and curators are becoming more and more necessary. Even if it is just guidance, as though you are just hosting a conversation.
“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.”
Jimmy Wales
iSummit 2008 is being held in Sapporo, Japan in July. For those of you who don’t know, iSummit is the international Summit of iCommons and the idea behind iCommons is a free digital culture and free sharing of knowledge.
This Year speakers include:
This year iSummit will have a parallel summit in Second Life with workshops, community discussion sessions, an open education track and much more. They will also be streaming the real keynote addresses from Japan live into Second Life, thereby making the summit even more accessible to the rest of the world.
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